The Life Fatale
J H Daniel
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She walks into the bar and sees him hunched in the corner. He is waiting for her, and he is smoking, as usual. A Pall Mall Red hangs from his bottom lip. Two hours of Tres Generaciones baits his breath, and when she comes up she kisses him without saying hello. The bar is dark and dirty and the kiss mink and drooly all at the same time. Prim slips into the booth and puts her elbows on the table. She orders a Jim Beam from the waitress: a Flo with teased-out hair and a hankering for old men who is not happy about Prim kissing on her regular. She puts down the Beam a little too hard, and some sloshes from the glass onto the table. Flo walks away thinking that Prim could be Gamble’s daughter.

At twenty-nine and three-quarters, I think no better of myself than to write white-trash stories for a few sleazy editors up North and sell handbags at a store in Huntsville, Alabama called Parisian’s. And it’s funny because neither I nor any of my co-workers are French, and most of our purses are made in Secaucus, New Jersey and China. I have a bachelor’s degree in journalism—barely—from a small mountain town in Colorado. I’ve been married for seven years. I started drinking Jim Beam to keep me warm when it was negative twenty-six degrees outside and snow covered the ground from October to June. And even though I now live in the place where I’m from, in a place where it hardly ever dips below the teens, I still get really cold. At least three to five times a week. I am childless.

This summates my life thus far, according to my college friends.

Gamble goes:

“How are the mountains?”

“The peaks. The peaks are there,” she says. Flo is standing too close for comfort, a trifling four feet away and Prim decides—right then and there— that she isn’t letting the old broad get in on any more of this.  So she cups her hands and whispers into Gamble’s ear.

“The rivers run when I think about you.”

By this time, Gamble’s hand is on Prim’s thigh, and it is starting to move towards higher elevations. After the ordered drinks, the banter and the cavorting, Gamble and Prim pay out. Gamble gets a hotel room on the wrong side of town, and as soon as he slides the key through the door and they are inside Room 222, Prim pulls off her jeans and throws them onto the floor. This gesture is not spontaneous. The look in Prim’s eyes most certainly displays a premeditated state of dishabille. Prim sticks her finger in her mouth and chews on the tip of her nail and watches Gamble watch her. She has been waiting for this for a long time. Gamble, too—but with age comes patience, and Gamble has a quarter of a century on Prim.

These are friends who live, work, think and play in Gunnison, Colorado, one of the last great small towns in America. As did I while posing as a southern belle exchange student on lease from the University of Alabama. I was a part of an undergrad program called the National Student Exchange. It was me and four other outsiders:  a Kentuckian, a Mississippian, a North Carolinian and one guy from New Orleans; the four exotic creatures from the South mixing it up at a Midwestern, hippie art school. Really, the program took a handful of redneck scholars and integrated us into another place for a semester so people could ask us questions like, “Are there really outhouses in the South?” You could go to Alaska, Vermont—somewhere other than where you were, based on your grades and a kick-ass entrance essay. My tour turned into a new way of life when I learned how to snowboard. And when I learned how to spend the rest of my time hiking and biking and climbing and fishing, one semester turned into two summers, two springs, two winters, two falls and a transfer to a school in God’s Country. Even better I was a newlywed, exploring the Wild West with my new husband, my co-navigator to an unearthed world. The day after our wedding we packed up a Pensky truck and carried the contents of our lives, and our black lab Mars, across the country for truly American adventures and sights unseen. (Here’s the scoop: Driving across Texas blows. But New Mexico makes up for it. The desert is proof that God exists, that He made beauty in curves and sand and flowers, that Georgia O’Keefe sits on His right side, and you can feel them both in the craters and the canyons and know that sex is a part of us and nature and God himself.)

He is standing inches from her, still watching her and wanting her, and looks down to find his hands pulling at the elastic part of her underwear. The part that rests on her hips and across her belly. He tugs on the left side and then lets it go, popping elastic against bone and then, snap! He does the same to the right side, pulling and letting go, pulling and letting go. Gamble is acting like a teenager, ticking away the seconds before sex to the beat of Prim’s cotton panties.

“Jesus, Prim,” he says. “Grey cottons with pink stitching? Are you a victim or a small-time crook?”

We drove up in August to find golden Aspen trees and neo-hippies; tourists and rich Texans with money to burn on a sunset view and a big vacation home behind a backdrop of snow-capped fourteeners. I studied Chaucer in the snow, practicing old English with my Midwest friends who giggled over the two gals from the South, reciting the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in our flaming accents:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

(When tha-at April with his suuure showers)

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

(Goddamn, the March drought has pierced that root)

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

(And bathed every vaaain in sweet lick her. Lick her? I hardly know her...)

The friends I made during my Gunny tenure never left it. The free-thinking and the isolation and the access to nature was enough for them to make a life worth owning in the Rockies. Go figure. They don’t have a mama in Alabama like mine. They met mountain boys and have their babies and their free-range chicken farms; their crisp, clean, unpolluted mountain air; their urbanely sprawling shelters. There are like, four stop-lights and no fat people in Gunnison. There simply isn’t enough air for them to breathe. The denizens are bustling, brawny families who home-school and eat macrobiotic diets and show their cows for 4-H in the summertime with the rest of the Midwestern kids. A town whose crime rate is non-existent, unless you count the drunken collegians stealing grocery buggies from City Market. Women can hitchhike. Alone. The mountains and the dusty roads and the cows and the God’s sprawling right in front of your fucking face make it seem like John Wayne and the Lone Ranger could, at any second, ride up beside you on their steeds, pick you up and carry you off into the blazing sunset. The children, sun-soaked and corn-fed, look as if any one of them might run up to you, tug at your Wranglers and cry out, “Shane! Oh, Shane!”

Prim tugs on Gamble’s hair while they kiss and take off each other’s clothes. She likes that he still has a full-head. For the next three hours, the old man and the young woman make like the animals. Primordial ardor.